St Peter’s Church of England Aided School is a larger than average-sized secondary school on the outskirts of Exeter. It has a recent Ofsted rating of Good and has above average Progress 8 of 0.37

In 2007 St Peter’s began a journey to transform learning, developing strategies to ensure students become successful independent learners for life.

As part of the L4 Qualification for the Aim Award – Managing Careers Guidance (QCF) Theresa Falconer Head of Careers at St Peters investigated opportunities for providing independent and impartial careers education and guidance, both face to face and online, as she had to think about the future especially if the school goes to Academy Status. “This is when I came across Grofar, an online service provider and I found that the licence for this is the same as 4 days buy-in with CSW. So whilst I don’t want to not have face to face meetings for vulnerable students, I must also consider a whole school approach. It was relatively easy to sync with the school’s SIMS system which saved me a lot of time. I needed a tool that could automate time consuming activities and manage administrative processes more effectively.”

“With Grofar I can easily:

Create a professional Career Plan which can be sent to the SMT and Governors and/or placed on the school website; use the pre-prepared texts or modify them to suit our own requirements; map it against the Gatsby Benchmarks.

Record details of businesses who are supporting the school.

Invite students to create their own passports and personalised action plans. Monitor their progress so that I can provide support when needed.

Invite students to events or one to one meetings, send reminders and related information. Event will appear in the students’ calendar.

Create an Alumni database.

Sort events in calendar by event type for simple management.

Record destination data for school leavers – export data for LA, DfE etc

Record Work Experience opportunities. Online student work experience log books re-enforce learning – which means I can contribute to saving money in view of recent budget cuts.

I believe this independent and impartial on-line service has a lot of resources and features which would allow me to work more efficiently as a sole practitioner. As part of our Careers Programme we planned to make registering on Grofar part of the Year 8 Guided Options programme. Before their interview with a member of SLT, students registered and completed their profiles. They also, through the Wizard, started to complete their Action Plans. I printed off the Action Plans prior to their interviews so that SLT could see some of the goals and aspirations of these students, which in turn helped to have meaningful conversations with both students and parents. Since then Years 9, 10 and 11 have been invited to register and before the end of the academic year, all Year 7s will be registered.”

What the school said:
Theresa Falconer Head of Careers said:

“While it is still early days I have been impressed with the responsiveness and flexibility of Grofar and the support I have received from the company”